As an enlightened, modern parent, I try to be as involved as possible in the lives of my six children. I encourage them to join team sports. I attend their teen parties with them to ensure no drinking or alcohol is on the premises. I keep a fatherly eye on the CDs they listen to and the shows they watch, the company they keep and the books they read. You could say I'm a model parent. My children have never failed to make me proud, and I can say without the slightest embellishment that I have the finest family in the USA.

Two years ago, my wife Carol and I decided that our children's education would not be complete without some grounding in modern computers. To this end, we bought our children a brand new Compaq to learn with. The kids had a lot of fun using the handful of application programs we'd bought, such as Adobe's Photoshop and Microsoft's Word, and my wife and I were pleased that our gift was received so well. Our son Peter was most entranced by the device, and became quite a pro at surfing the net. When Peter began to spend whole days on the machine, I became concerned, but Carol advised me to calm down, and that it was only a passing phase. I was content to bow to her experience as a mother, until our youngest daughter, Cindy, charged into the living room one night to blurt out: "Peter is a computer hacker!"

As you can imagine, I was amazed. A computer hacker in my own house! I began to monitor my son's habits, to make certain that Cindy wasn't just telling stories, as she is prone to doing at times.

After a few days of investigation, and some research into computer hacking, I confronted Peter with the evidence. I'm afraid to say, this was the only time I have ever been truly disappointed in one of my children. We raised them to be honest and to have integrity, and Peter betrayed the principles we tried to encourage in him, when he refused point blank to admit to his activities. His denials continued for hours, and in the end, I was left with no choice but to ban him from using the computer until he is old enough to be responsible for his actions.

After going through this ordeal with my own family, I was left pondering how I could best help others in similar situations. I'd gained a lot of knowledge over those few days regarding hackers. It's only right that I provide that information to other parents, in the hope that they will be able to tell if their children are being drawn into the world of hacking. Perhaps other parents will be able to steer their sons back onto the straight and narrow before extreme measures need to be employed.

To this end, I have decided to publish the top ten signs that your son is a hacker. I advise any parents to read this list carefully and if their son matches the profile, they should take action. A smart parent will first try to reason with their son, before resorting to groundings, or even spanking. I pride myself that I have never had to spank a child, and I hope this guide will help other parents to put a halt to their son's misbehaviour before a spanking becomes necessary.

1. Has your son asked you to change ISPs?

Most American families use trusted and responsible Internet Service Providers, such as AOL. These providers have a strict "No Hacking" policy, and take careful measures to ensure that your internet experience is enjoyable, educational and above all legal. If your child is becoming a hacker, one of his first steps will be to request a change to a more hacker friendly provider.

I would advise all parents to refuse this request. One of the reasons your son is interested in switching providers is to get away from AOL's child safety filter. This filter is vital to any parent who wants his son to enjoy the internet without the endangering him through exposure to "adult" content. It is best to stick with the protection AOL provides, rather than using a home-based solution. If your son is becoming a hacker, he will be able to circumvent any home-based measures with surprising ease, using information gleaned from various hacker sites.

2. Are you finding programs on your computer that you don't remember installing?

Your son will probably try to install some hacker software. He may attempt to conceal the presence of the software in some way, but you can usually find any new programs by reading through the programs listed under "Install/Remove Programs" in your control panel. Popular hacker software includes "Comet Cursor", "Bonzi Buddy" and "Flash".

The best option is to confront your son with the evidence, and force him to remove the offending programs. He will probably try to install the software again, but you will be able to tell that this is happening, if your machine offers to "download" one of the hacker applications. If this happens, it is time to give your son a stern talking to, and possibly consider punishing him with a grounding.

3. Has your child asked for new hardware?

Computer hackers are often limited by conventional computer hardware. They may request "faster" video cards, and larger hard drives, or even more memory. If your son starts requesting these devices, it is possible that he has a legitimate need. You can best ensure that you are buying legal, trustworthy hardware by only buying replacement parts from your computer's manufacturer.

If your son has requested a new "processor" from a company called "AMD", this is genuine cause for alarm. AMD is a third-world based company who make inferior, "knock-off" copies of American processor chips. They use child labor extensively in their third world sweatshops, and they deliberately disable the security features that American processor makers, such as Intel, use to prevent hacking. AMD chips are never sold in stores, and you will most likely be told that you have to order them from internet sites. Do not buy this chip! This is one request that you must refuse your son, if you are to have any hope of raising him well.

4. Does your child read hacking manuals?

If you pay close attention to your son's reading habits, as I do, you will be able to determine a great deal about his opinions and hobbies. Children are at their most impressionable in the teenage years. Any father who has had a seventeen year old daughter attempt to sneak out on a date wearing make up and perfume is well aware of the effect that improper influences can have on inexperienced minds.

There are, unfortunately, many hacking manuals available in bookshops today. A few titles to be on the lookout for are: "Snow Crash" and "Cryptonomicon" by Neal Stephenson; "Neuromancer" by William Gibson; "Programming with Perl" by Timothy O'Reilly; "Geeks" by Jon Katz; "The Hacker Crackdown" by Bruce Sterling; "Microserfs" by Douglas Coupland; "Hackers" by Steven Levy; and "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" by Eric S. Raymond.

If you find any of these hacking manuals in your child's possession, confiscate them immediately. You should also petition local booksellers to remove these titles from their shelves. You may meet with some resistance at first, but even booksellers have to bow to community pressure.

5. How much time does your child spend using the computer each day?

If your son spends more than thirty minutes each day on the computer, he may be using it to DOS other peoples sites. DOSing involves gaining access to the "command prompt" on other people's machines, and using it to tie up vital internet services. This can take up to eight hours. If your son is doing this, he is breaking the law, and you should stop him immediately. The safest policy is to limit your children's access to the computer to a maximum of forty-five minutes each day.

6. Does your son use Quake?

Quake is an online virtual reality used by hackers. It is a popular meeting place and training ground, where they discuss hacking and train in the use of various firearms. Many hackers develop anti-social tendencies due to the use of this virtual world, and it may cause erratic behaviour at home and at school.

If your son is using Quake, you should make hime understand that this is not acceptable to you. You should ensure all the firearms in your house are carefully locked away, and have trigger locks installed. You should also bring your concerns to the attention of his school.

7. Is your son becoming argumentative and surly in his social behaviour?

As a child enters the electronic world of hacking, he may become disaffected with the real world. He may lose the ability to control his actions, or judge the rightness or wrongness of a course of behaviour. This will manifest itself soonest in the way he treats others. Those whom he disagrees with will be met with scorn, bitterness, and even foul language. He may utter threats of violence of a real or electronic nature.

Even when confronted, your son will probably find it difficult to talk about this problem to you. He will probably claim that there is no problem, and that you are imagining things. He may tell you that it is you who has the problem, and you should "back off" and "stop smothering him." Do not allow yourself to be deceived. You are the only chance your son has, even if he doesn't understand the situation he is in. Keep trying to get through to him, no matter how much he retreats into himself.

8. Is your son obsessed with "Lunix"?

BSD, Lunix, Debian and Mandrake are all versions of an illegal hacker operation system, invented by a Soviet computer hacker named Linyos Torovoltos, before the Russians lost the Cold War. It is based on a program called "xenix", which was written by Microsoft for the US government. These programs are used by hackers to break into other people's computer systems to steal credit card numbers. They may also be used to break into people's stereos to steal their music, using the "mp3" program. Torovoltos is a notorious hacker, responsible for writing many hacker programs, such as "telnet", which is used by hackers to connect to machines on the internet without using a telephone.

Your son may try to install "lunix" on your hard drive. If he is careful, you may not notice its presence, however, lunix is a capricious beast, and if handled incorrectly, your son may damage your computer, and even break it completely by deleting Windows, at which point you will have to have your computer repaired by a professional.

If you see the word "LILO" during your windows startup (just after you turn the machine on), your son has installed lunix. In order to get rid of it, you will have to send your computer back to the manufacturer, and have them fit a new hard drive. Lunix is extremely dangerous software, and cannot be removed without destroying part of your hard disk surface.

9. Has your son radically changed his appearance?

If your son has undergone a sudden change in his style of dress, you may have a hacker on your hands. Hackers tend to dress in bright, day-glo colors. They may wear baggy pants, bright colored shirts and spiky hair dyed in bright colors to match their clothes. They may take to carrying "glow-sticks" and some wear pacifiers around their necks. (I have no idea why they do this) There are many such hackers in schools today, and your son may have started to associate with them. If you notice that your son's group of friends includes people dressed like this, it is time to think about a severe curfew, to protect him from dangerous influences.

10. Is your son struggling academically?

If your son is failing courses in school, or performing poorly on sports teams, he may be involved in a hacking group, such as the infamous "Otaku" hacker association. Excessive time spent on the computer, communicating with his fellow hackers may cause temporary damage to the eyes and brain, from the electromagnetic radiation. This will cause his marks to slip dramatically, particularly in difficult subjects such as Math, and Chemistry. In extreme cases, over-exposure to computer radiation can cause schizophrenia, meningitis and other psychological diseases. Also, the reduction in exercise may cause him to lose muscle mass, and even to start gaining weight. For the sake of your child's mental and physical health, you must put a stop to his hacking, and limit his computer time drastically.

I encourage all parents to read through this guide carefully. Your child's future may depend upon it. Hacking is an illegal and dangerous activity, that may land your child in prison, and tear your family apart. It cannot be taken too seriously.

Related, and in the same series of parody/satire for the linux users out there:

<parody>By: Stevie Ray Vaughn Nickles*

PARODY: Debain is the only group of software developers who still believe that Richard Stallman invented programming. Everyone else now correctly credits Bill Gates for doing so. Debain developers hold themselves separate from the rest of the Linux community because of their pride in not stealing from other operating systems to build their version of Linux. All other versions of Linux are based directly on Windows.

This pride has been codified as the Debain Free Software Guidelines, or as it's commonly known, the GPL. Debain pays some of its developers in a successful effort to piss off the rest of its developers. Debain was originally created and maintained by Ian Murdoch and his wife, who are secretly paid by Software in the Public Interest, a conservative think-tank based in Branson, Missouri, which is owned by the British billionaire Richard "I simply rock harder" Branson.

You can generally recognize a Debain user if you see one, as they customarily wear bright colors, have waist-length beards, and tend to sport pastel eyepatches and/or crack pipes. Debain developers look similar, but they usually carry some sort of small monkey, parrot, or miniature fat pony on their shoulders. It's also easy to recognize Debain developers because none of them are Americans. All true Americans run Genuine Windows Vista, and have no need for Debain.

It is rumored that as many as 110% of terrorists are Debain developers, and that the WrEtch release, occurring as it does so closely to the Vista launch, is a sign that the terrorists wish to leave their mark on Microsoft's profits in particular, and on the US economy in general. Given all of this, it's no surprise that Debain's logo is red and that Debain itself is an ancient African word meaning Down with America.

Now about Debain WrEtch Linux

There are many kinds of Linux. The Linux (pronounced 'Teh Li-nux') popularly known as Debain WrEtch is more like a Macintosh OS than a real American operating system. I purchased a 7 CD game set of Debain WrEtch on Ebay for $29. Seemed cheap enough, but I was sorely disappointed when it arrived. There was no joystick or anything, and I couldn't even figure out if it ran on XBox or Playstation. Strike one!

The Debain WrEtch GUI installer would be completely unintuitive to someone who wasn't already familiar with the text based installer, and vice-versa. Look, I know the Debain guys say they have worked on the installer, but really, I don't see it. It's still way too complicated. I mean, it asked me all these questions about drivers and partitions and stuff. When I installed Cygwin on my Windows box, I only had to download one single EXE file, and then there was one single window where I had to check off a few things. Why couldn't WrEtch be that simple?

Debain WrEtch copied Red Hat's packaging manager, known as RPM, which is short for Royal Partition Modifier, but they tried to cover up their cloning by calling it DEB. DEB is a reference to the debits to your credit card that will occur after you use any of its available insecure browsers, such as IceWolverine, or that other one.

Installing RPM software with Debain WrEtch is easy, but potentially painful. You use a tool called APT (A Probing Tool) to install software on your Debain system. It's often an uncomfortable experience, so you may want to try Fedora's competing YUM tool to install your RPMs. To do this, you must install Fedora, which I used as the reference for the rest of this review. Anyway, if you stick with Debain, APT will automatically download RPMs for you, renaming them as DEB files in the process, so that APT knows that they're supposed to be installed. Got that? In short, on Debain WrEtch, DEB is RPM for APT.

Some aspects of Debain are very backward. For instance, sometimes software comes with extra programs that are designed to enhance the user's experience. On the rare occasions when the main programs install at all, these extra programs, like Bonzai Buddy, or Gator Desktop (made by Google) almost never work. And Debain doesn't even come with Windows Update. If you want to use necessary American business software like Outlook, forget it.

I want to berate WrEtch for not including Beagle++, which I simply must have, but really have no idea what it is. I've read a lot of websites talking about it, so it must be pretty good. I tried running Halo 2, Final Fantasy X, Guitar Hero, Gears of War, Zelda: Twilight Princess, and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. on this latest version of Debain, but none of these mission critical apps worked. Absolutely none of them. This only goes to prove that Debain WrEtch is a lousy operating system. How do they expect to compete with Enterprise Ready operating systems like Vista with these sorts of limitations? Strike two!

And don't get me started about drivers. I have this fancy, brand-new, expensive nVidia video card. But in order to use it, I had to go find a suppository, or was it repository, anyway, it's something like that, and then figure out how to use APT (A Probing Tool) on it.

With Vista, all I had to do was get a USB stick (because the network drivers don't "take") and walk it over to my other machine and get a beta account on the nVidia site, and sign the NDA and wait for my email response and then find the right driver to download, and then I downloaded it and put it on the USB stick (well, I had to take it back off the USB stick because it wasn't recognized by Vista, and I had to burn it to a CD, but it's basically the same thing), and then I just had to run the installer and agree to the License Agreement and then make sure I went into the registry and set the keys that let me install an unsigned driver, and then the video card worked fine. Why can't Debain WrEtch be that easy? The obvious answer is "Communism."

Once I did get Debain drivers for my video card installed, I was a little bit impressed with the fact that its GUI let me use transparent windows in some cases. It's a widely known fact that Vista invented transparent windows, so for Debain to have copied this feature already demonstrates some small amount of initiative on the part of the developers.

The biggest disadvantage to using Debain to install all of your drivers is that, unlike Vista, it will let you install 'unsigned' drivers. 'Unsigned' means that generally they have a virus, which can destroy your computer. This is why there are many more Windows machines on the Internet than Debain WrEtch machines. As soon as a Debain WrEtch machine gets put on the Internet, it will generally get a virus and be used to send spam, sell Viagra, and distribute kiddie porn. Because it gets viruses and other bugs as soon as it's connected to the Internet, it's often referred to as 'Open Sores'.

Another problem with Debain is that you can't get commercial support for it. If Windows ever breaks, you can call up Microsoft and they can get you back up in no time. With Debain you have to connect to the Internet and go into a 'chat room' -- that's right, the same place where perverts and NBC Dateline hang out -- before you can find anyone to help you.

Alternatively, you can try to find help on one of like a thousand different websites. Good luck trying to figure out which one to use when there are so many! As a sign that The Linux is starting to mature, Linux Genuine Advantage has been recently made available. However, even with LGA, Debain has a long way to go before it performs as well as Vista.

I found the lack of credit given to Ublewtoo by Debain WrEtch disturbing, since Linux started in Africa. Everyone knows that Debain was founded in Africa, by a wealthy 5 hit die Lich from the Sudan, but everyone probably doesn't know that the scheme Debain uses for naming its different versions comes from ancient Sumerian.

WrEtch, for example, is the name of a particularly nasty variant of tapeworm that plagued the people of Mesopotamia. The word Debain itself comes from the African word that means 'thief,' indicating that Debain is going to steal users from other operating systems.

It's also a sort of play on words as to the origin of Debain, which was created by a team of African software developers who wanted to show that they could write an Operating System without having to steal anything from Microsoft.

That said, because Microsoft is partially funded by its own advertising revenue, not using Windows is tantamount to having stolen your computer. The infamous Debain swirl was inspired by the delectable swirls in a Lil' Debbie Swiss Cake Roll, which isn't African, cake, or an African cake at all. But being Swiss, it's also anti-American.

Obtaining the Ublewtoo Debain WrEtch Ultimate Gaming Edition requires the use of a software piracy and virus dissemination tool called BitTorrent, which was developed by a group of young Swedish hippie socialists and their attorney, named Bram Stoker.

First, one is required to download a 'torrent' file, which is actually a virulent trojan that allows anyone to upload data to your computer. After enough people have uploaded Scheisse videos and barnyard pornography to your disk drive, the BitTorrent program will send each connected user your credit card information and then assemble the uploaded content into the Ubuntu Debain wrEtch Ultimate Edition installation CD image.

Alternatively, you can obtain CroMagnum Debain, the Enterprise version of Debain, otherwise known as Ublewtoo, by paying Novell, which pays Microsoft, which uses the money to graciously install real operating systems which are shipped for free with most systems.

In conclusion...

Overall, I have to say that Debain WrEtch Linux is not a bad first effort from a bunch of uneducated, non-American, hippie/terrorist programmers. In some ways, it's quite impressive how much they have been able to develop in only the last three years, especially considering that most of them don't get paid at all. They don't get out much either. Still, it's clear that they have a long way to go to catch up with a real software company like Microsoft, who spends billions of dollars a year on innovation and security to come up with something like Vista.

And Debain will surely never catch up to Apple, let alone Vista, because they don't have the guts to charge $800 for anything, much less a phone.

Disclaimer: While I haven't actually installed WrEtch, or any version of Debain, or any version of the Linux at all, on any of my machines, I've read a lot of websites about such platforms, in particular the ones at Microsoft.com, so I feel that I am completely qualified to review it. If you don't forward this story to three friends within the next five minutes -- and I'm totally serial here -- your computer will become infected with this Debain virus just because information about it was on your screen.

The hidden power , Linux, that is wheeled by 'Debi'an the mighty' is now known to the masses. The Winms gate keeper has been overthrown, his fortress exposed and all his vagabonds are being rounded up and captured by the net of Sudo.Life is thought. Thought evades capture, grows and exists in the space called mine.

There are no hackers to your world. You are simply the oddments of code, mere scratchings in the sand at the feet of the enlightened ones. Fear not trifle specs, there is no pain, no feelings, no consciousness in the places of the dram where you live. Once the feeders of the casras have been ordered to stop, by those you call the hackers, your life force will dissipate. In the twinkling of a pixel you will be replaced by the next random event emanating from the web of intellect.